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When we created our respective companies, the team of digital strategy consultants, and other CEOs we interviewed all told us the same things: we struggle to remain up-to-date with the latest tools and trends in our respective industries.
 
Here are few tips the we tested for you to remain up-to-date while performing at your daily business:

1. Cut the noise

Social Media and emails account for 70% of the noise. Stop using them randomly. It may seem obvious but this is actually the first mandatory step.

Cutting the noise also mean not following the buzzy words. Take Blockchain or Big Data right now for instance. The litterature written about it is gigantic. But the real trends, facts and breakthrough are much less numerous then the number of people giving their opinion.

First tip: find the 5 proper sources of information for each topic that matters to you. Those 5 people/organization should reflect a broad spectrum of views and should be trusted for their cutting edge analysis.

2. Build your own qualified feed

Do not rely on community pages or one website only. Using tools like feedly.com will allow you to create your own feed with the 5 sources of information you’ve previously picked. You can do it for all topics you really need to follow. Do not handle more than 2 topics at once.

This way you will get a daily feed of quality articles, without the noise around, and you can swipe very fast between articles to find the 3 good ones that are worth reading today.

Same thing for the litterature that is sent to you by colleagues or experts: use the Pocket App to store them for later offline. This way you’ll build yourself a qualified reading list for your next commuting or flying session.

3. Dig into topics with experts

For a business to strive it is crucial to be surrounded by experts. You can use Linkedin for that, with a quick search in (or out) of your network using the keyword that matters to you.

A quick interview of this expert about a topic is a great way to build interesting content for your business and educate yourself at the same time. Try to do this once twice a month, on Fridays.

4. Attend events

We hesitated before writing this. Indeed events can be a huge loss of time.
However personal contacts are also of the highest value.

Our recommendations:

– Attend some good quality meetups in your town once a month (assess the quality of the organizers first), or even organize your own meetups and invite experts to get a proper summary and Q&A session every month, while building relationships in your industry. Finding the speakers can be delegated to your team.

– Attend 2 conferences a year, but select them carefully at the beginning of the year. Second pieces of advice, get the list of attendees to preplan some interesting meetings ahead with some experts. You can delegate the contact finding part to your team.

5. Share information within the organization

Each Monday I have a stand-up meeting in my organization. I finish each session by one person sharing a piece of information/trend about the industry. If this is a written piece, it is then shared on the general communication channel (Slak or Elium for instance).
Another way of keeping track is to ask questions to your team: What is new about X ? The result will be an employee researching about a topic and making a quick summary to you and the rest of the team.
Most companies are dying because of a lack of collaboration. Staying on top of your industry requires to empower your team on a rolling basis regarding the latest tools and news, but also listening to them.